The Painful Nowning Process

Two worlds collided, fortuitously, and the result was that I finally got to a university dramatic production this year. Some faculty friends had planned to attend the Thursday night show of Scapin (translated and adapted from Moliere’s 18th c. comedy). Then we thought those plans might be set aside when those of us in the English department realized we were going to spend much of the day interviewing and entertaining a job candidate. In the end, the candidate wished to attend the show, so we all went anyway and had a very good time.

Two students in the play are also in my courses this semester, one acting and the other behind the scenes. I am always happy to see “my” students shine outside the classroom, as well as in it.

If I had any criticism of the play, it would only be the universal pronunciation of the title character’s French name as “Scapon” instead of “Scapin.” But then, most Americans called that Baz Luhrman movie “Moulon Rouge,” too. Sigh. The actor who portrayed Scapin, by the way, did a bangup job. Applause to the whole cast!

OK! It looks more or less as I like. I’m opening up shop.

Nothing much to say: it’s my last day of teaching. Exams next week. I’ve had some really good students this semester, and I probably haven’t appreciated them sufficiently because I’ve been sleep-deprived most of the semester. But most of them have been diligent, and some have been truly outstanding. I salute them. Of course, they still have to pass their exams!

I’ll probably think of something interesting soon. Meanwhile, my sister has been here with the DDRA. I try not to envy her.

The story of my new blog is yet another (I suppose) of many interweb stories: our longtime ISP earthlink once came to us via dial-up, then our telephone company continued our earthlink via their dsl service, which was even nicer. Earthlink included 10mb webspace & site-building tools, with which I constructed my first blog. It was clunky, but I had some fun and learned a few things.

Earlier this month, our phone company, which shall remain nameless, announced that they were switching customers over to their own brand-X e-mail, which will probably be super duper in many ways–though they still don’t provide enough (read hardly any) support for Mac users. I don’t know what this means for our earthlink service, but I suspect it means the end of my blogsite. I’ve been thinking about joining the 21st century in any case, and this seems a good excuse.

I hope to upload archives from the old blog to this site in the next few days and weeks.